Medical Education US

Can this be done: MD/PHD in Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology, respectively. Has anyone heard of this? If so, how long would it take with residency and all that good stuff?

Thanks, Jordan

I've never heard of anyone doing this. From what I would guess, you'd have to first go to college as an undergraduate. You'd then want to do your PhD in clinical psychology, which I believe is usually a 4 year program - I think the 3rd and 4th year, or maybe just the 4th year is considered the "externship" when you do your clinical rotations. After that, I think you need to do an internship in order to be eligible to practice clinical psychology - which would be another 1 year I believe.

Then you'd have to start medical school, which would be 4 years. Then you'd do your residency in psychiatry which would take 4 years. So, in total, I figure
4 years college
4 years psychology grad school
1 year psychology internship
4 years medical school
4 years psychiatry residency
Total after high school = 17 years.

Now, you would not necessarily need to do your psychology internship, as I believe you could practice any psychology approaches with your medical license, not needing to be licensed in psychology. However, the intership would provide a lot of the additional experience that is unique to psychology.

In my opinion, I can't see any reason you'd want to do that. You can get very good training in psychotherapy during psychiatry residency training if you select a program with a strong psychotherapy program. The big thing you'd be missing is the training in formal psychological testing and scoring. I'm not sure if psychiatrists can get training and licensed to perform these tests, or if you would require a PhD (or PsyD) in psychology.

I agree with Dr. Admin, that seems like a lot of overlapping training for not much extra in return!

However, there is a place which might offer something similar to that... if someone had a REALLY good reason for wanting to do both medical school and a PhD in Psychology.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) offers an unbeatable array of combined MD/PhD programs. You can literally choose almost any doctoral program offered at UIUC to combine with your medical school curriculum. Most places with dual degree programs limit them to the hard sciences, but not UIUC! I have a friend from undergrad, and another from grad school, who are there doing PhDs in Community Health in conjunction with their medical studies. That is related, obviously, but other candidates study English, Foreign Language and Literature, Math, Physics, Art... you name it. It's a pretty cool system!

Again, though, there would have to be a really good reason to want to do it!

Best of luck with everything...

CN